Louisville Medicine Volume 65, Issue 9 | Page 14

REFLECTIONS

( continued from page 11) the quick and sustained responses to catastrophes through the years. Better still, preemptive, preventive and curative medical missions now thrive. Specialized missions to restore cataract blindness or remove the social sting of cleft lips and palates are available. Many medical missions incorporate a surgical team that removes diseased thyroids, cysts and tumors. These groups take their own surgeons, anesthesia experts and machines to make this possible. Dentists have been a part of teams to extract teeth beyond repair, treat infections and teach dental hygiene. Coordination between the missions and the venue where patients are to be seen is done in advance to maximize the effectiveness of treatment and follow up care.

Our medical schools, church and non-church based organizations nowadays provide opportunities for medical missions that include pre-medical, pre-clinical and clinical medical students to join them. What a wealth of information these missions provide for those that join them! Not only do they see firsthand various diseases and health hazards they had only read about, they are exposed to hundreds of patients who have waited so long to be seen. They help to diagnose and treat patients, and realize they have to do their best regarding complications and follow up care, because these patients may not be seen again. They see these patients as a whole: their background, their humanity, their gratitude. Unencumbered by paperwork, they are motivated and can hardly wait to read more about the pathologies they have seen. It also makes them realize the privilege and responsibility of being physicians, and how they impact the lives of those they treat. As a student mused after coming back from one such mission,“ It was a humbling and amazing experience.”

Of course, added to that are the educational and aesthetic aspects of seeing new cultures, exotic sceneries and interaction with hosts and the populace. Hopefully when these fledgling physicians become full time practitioners, having seen the need outside their own comfortable quarters, they will look back and lend a hand to those barely holding their own in their end of the world, for the world is wide and the chances many to alleviate its ills. We just have to be aware and willing!

Medical mission, anyone? Dr. Bacani-Oropilla is a retired psychiatrist.

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